Team Foundation Server will also be available in retail for around $500 USD and will include a license term allowing up to five (5) named users without CALs to use Team Foundation Server. To grow to more than five users, you will need to have CALs for additional users beyond five users. This enables small teams of five or fewer to get up and running on Team Foundation Server for as little as $500 USD.

If a company can afford to pay 10 full-time employees, then $4990 isn't a major expense (of course, neither is $499 for a single developer).

As for CALs themselves, I think you need to contact a reseller for those. I get my SALs (similar, but different) from Insight UK. Insight do TFS SALs, but I don't know about CALs because I can't see them on their website or by searching for them. Give them a ding: http://uk.insight.com/en-gb/information/contact

Retail TFS does not come with 5-CALs. It has a EULA exception allowing up to 5 users without CALs. The primary difference is that CALs can be used to access multiple TFS instances. A EULA exception cannot. In other words, buying two TFS retail licenses does NOT give me rights for 10-users on one instance of TFS. It gives me rights to two instances with 5-users each. To add more than 5 users, you must have CALs for all additional users.

Each TFS deployment allows access from 5 users without CALs. Once you get beyond 5 users, each user must have a CAL. That's a serious hit once you go from 5 users to 6 users. Microsoft seriously needs to straighten out their licensing madness.

Edit: I read that incorrectly. Once you go beyond 5, you need a CAL for each additional user.

So, it's USD399 (upgrade) for 5 users, and USD499 each for the remain 5 users. So it's USD2900 to upgrade TFS itself. Then you need to upgrade each copy of VS.

@W3bbo: Unfortunately, you also have to pay an additional licensing fee to upgrade VS2010 itself. So you're talking 10 grand total.

OTOH, VS2010 Pro with MSDN is USD732 for the upgrade price. Each sub includes TFS with 1 CAL. Since CALs can be used to access an unlimited number of TFS deployments, you can install one copy of TFS on a server, and have all clients access the same TFS deployment.

So the total would be USD7320 for 10 devs, even without volume licensing discounts.

It's clear Microsoft really, really wants you to subscribe to MSDN and never let it expire.

This thread just cracks me up, even reading back through it I still have no idea how much they would pay or how CALs work.

As someone who has had the "pleasure" of dealing with Microsoft licensing - they have the most convoluted nonsensical system in the universe. They literally made me take a "test" before I could continue trying to purchase licences.

I wish whoever wants to deal with Microsoft on that never luck - they will need it.

@ManipUni:It's not nearly as complicated as it might at first seem, though admittedly it's never going to be as simple as buying a single retail "product". The advantage is that it generally scales reasonably well for most products (the difficulty usually being around the size where per-server costs start to be better than per-user)

Believe me I've seen far more complex and convoluted licensing schemes than anything Microsoft has ever dreamt up in my time.

We use a mix of VS2005 pro and VS2008 pro against a TFS2005 server. We do not have MSDN subs and we don't want to upgrade to VS2010 unless this financially reduces our costs of CALs. The licenses we have are from MSDN subs that we let expire when the recession started.

The retail version of TFS2010 may or may not come with 5 CALs (it's in a white paper somewhere, but the MS chap on the end of the phone had apparently never heard of this).

Additional CALs may cost several hundred pounds extra each (we think we need 3 more that the possible 5 included with TFS givint the required 8 in total). We can probably shop round for these for the best price.

Looking currently like a purchase of retail TFS2010 and three extra CALS is the best option, but it's taken several phone-calls and emails over several days to figure this out and even then we can't verify that this is correct.

We now need to balance these costs against the costs of MSDN subs (possibily as part of a VS2010 pro upgrade, possibly as part of standalone subs). After all of this we need to convince the company partners that this is a worthwhile purchase to reduce the large amounts of time we spend waiting for TFS2005 to branch and merge.

Where did that come from? VS2005 and VS2008 work fine with TFS2010. That's how I work.

I presumed that TFS 2010 had some integration features that worked with VS2010. Otherwise, there'd really be no need to synchronize new releases of Visual Studio with new releases of Visual Studio TFS.

@Dr Herbie: VS2008 Team Explorer doesn't know how to deal with TFS2010's multiple project collections, so getting them connected requires the full URL to the project collection instead of just the server name.

We use a mix of VS2005 pro and VS2008 pro against a TFS2005 server. We do not have MSDN subs and we don't want to upgrade to VS2010 unless this financially reduces our costs of CALs. The licenses we have are from MSDN subs that we let expire when the recession started.

The retail version of TFS2010 may or may not come with 5 CALs (it's in a white paper somewhere, but the MS chap on the end of the phone had apparently never heard of this).

Additional CALs may cost several hundred pounds extra each (we think we need 3 more that the possible 5 included with TFS givint the required 8 in total). We can probably shop round for these for the best price.

Looking currently like a purchase of retail TFS2010 and three extra CALS is the best option, but it's taken several phone-calls and emails over several days to figure this out and even then we can't verify that this is correct.

We now need to balance these costs against the costs of MSDN subs (possibily as part of a VS2010 pro upgrade, possibly as part of standalone subs). After all of this we need to convince the company partners that this is a worthwhile purchase to reduce the large amounts of time we spend waiting for TFS2005 to branch and merge.

@Dr Herbie:According to the blog post that I linked, TFS2010 doesn't come with any CALs. However, you can have up to 5 users connecting to a TFS2010 deployment without a CAL, if that makes any sense at all. If you want 10 users on a single deployment, you need TFS2010 + 5 CALs. Should you ever decide on a 2nd deployment of TFS, then 5 of those users with CALs can attach to both deployments simultaneously, while 5 have to remain on only one. However, the 2nd deployment can have an additional 5 users without CALs as well. Clear as mud.